Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: computers

Coupons.com Sucks

Coupons.com requires you to install some special software for diabetic coupon printing, and it specifically does not work in VMs.

My grandma needed some coupons printed which are related to an arthritis drug called Zostrix (note the rel="nofollow") but was having some problems doing so. My mom also had such problems, so I decided to give it a go using my shiny new printer.

It turns out that the coupons for this drug are printed via Coupons.com, but when I went to use their service I was informed that it didn’t support my browser (FF3 on a Mac). Switching over to a VM running IE7 under XP I found that the site requires one to install some sort of silly coupon printing software in order to do the printing. Since I was using a VM I took a snapshot then attempted to install the software, at which point I received the above error.

The damned software refuses to install in a VM.

At this point I’m just not going to print the coupons… I don’t want to cruft up my normal or work machines (the only interactive non-VMs I have) with such crap, so there’s not much more I can do. Digging around a bit more on it, I found this writeup called A Closer Look at Coupons.com which details quite a number of questionable things done by this software.

13 Comments

Paved Night Ride

Everyone who was on the ride around Mt. Clemens except for me. Left to right is Perry, John, Marty, Nick, and Mike.

Here, have a photo of everyone who went for a ride tonight from Mt. Clemens High School to Metro Beach and back, except for me. It’s not a very good photo. This one of Marty and Nick is better, despite the huge amount of noise from the high ISO.

After getting home from the ride I stuck the extra RAM in the printer and my Mac, and everything seems to be working great. The printer (Xerox Phaser 6130N) got a 1GB Crucial SO-DIMM (CT12864AC53E) to bring it to 1.1GB and the Mac Pro got 4GB of RAM bringing it to 7GB. I now can run multiple VMs with ease and deal with multiple large image files without a bunch of paging.

It’s been a good day and a good evening.

Leave a Comment

Xerox Phaser 6130N

Xerox Phaser 6130, which was $249 via Costco.

A few weeks back I mentioned that I really needed a new printer, as my old HP LaserJet 5L had mostly ceased working. Well, last week Costco had a Xerox Phaser 6130N listed on their site for $249 shipped, with a Tripp Lite surge protector and USB cable.

I ended up jumping on this deal, because it has all the features I was looking for in a printer, except a duplexer, which really isn’t that important anyway. In short, this is a networked color laser which speaks real Adobe PostScript 3 (Wikipedia PostScript article), making it properly usable from any OS without silly Gutenprint (GIMP-Print) drivers and their crappy dithering.

The price was also outstanding, as Newegg sells this printer for $359.99 and most other places want even more than that. I also made a quick trip over to Crucial for a $16.99 piece of CT12864AC53E should bring the total RAM in the printer up to 1152MB. That ought to make printing complex documents fast.

Leave a Comment

rowla.nuxx.net, RIP

PuTTY screenshot of a disconnected session to rowla.nuxx.net after shutting it down for the last time.

That’s it. rowla.nuxx.net has been turned off, and I’m slated to pick it up tomorrow sometime around lunch. Everything has been moved over and seems to be working great. So, if I host your stuff on nuxx.net and you are having a problem, please let me know so that it may be corrected.

Leave a Comment

Time For A New Printer

Old parallel port printer cable connecting into the back of my work laptop, a Dell D610.

I guess I really need a new printer. After almost a year of limping along with a failing HP LaserJet 5L at home I’m finding I can’t even convince it to print any more. Today I was able to get it to print a test page while manually guiding the paper deep into the feed mechanism, but then I was unable to print properly from either my Mac or work laptop via lpr (to the JetDirect), or straight from my work laptop via parallel port.

Two pages bearing print did leave the printer eventually when connected via parallel port, but only half of the PDF which I needed to print (a free admission ticket to Addison Oaks for riding the mountain bike trails) was actually render correctly. Oh well. I guess it’s time to go to Kinkos.

Leave a Comment

Busy Weekend

This weekend looks to be very busy. I’m still at work, don’t know when I’ll be leaving, and likely will have to put in some time on either Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

The new hard disks for my server are going to be delivered today, so hopefully the wipe of the failing ones (with DBAN) will be complete by the time I arrive home so that I’ll be able to do the dump and restore, check out the install, then get in with more burn-in.

I’d originally planned on riding both the Tour De Troit and the Addison Oaks Fall Classic this Saturday and Sunday (respectively), but I just don’t think I want to schedule things that tightly. So, maybe I’ll get out and ride a bit, but it definitely won’t be anything planned or structured.

Now, to get this stuff at work wrapped up. Thankfully Danielle brought me some really, really yummy lunch from Rangoli Express so that I didn’t have to leave for lunch today. It was really, really, really good.

(No, I’m not neglecting work right now… I’m just waiting for some other folks so I can keep going with stuff that I’m doing.)

Leave a Comment

+12 Hours of Breakin

Breakin, having run for 12h 28m 33s after swapping RAM around.

Yesterday I ordered a pair of Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3500320NS disks to replace the two which failed on Tuesday. Today I called Newegg about my RMA for the old ones and the old controller and was able to get the 15% restocking fee waived for both the controller and drives. Hopefully the drives will arrive tomorrow and I can dump | restore the OS and such, then start Breakin running so that it can thrash the drives for a few days.

Speaking of Breakin, I disconnected the disks from the machine (but left them mostly fitted in the case as to not disrupt airflow) and started Breakin running this morning before I left for work. When I arrived home it was still running, unlike last week when it regularly failed with MCEs. This is good, as I had been unable to get it to run for this long before.

Leave a Comment

SMART Issues

When I got home I started running SeaTools, Seagate’s disk diagnostics utility for Windows, on the ad4 which had begun failing earlier. It reported back that it, and the other hard drive, were just fine. However, when booting into FreeBSD after using them I found that both drives were now indicating that Seek_Error_Rate was past threshold. The OS booted very slow, then kicked ad6 out of the mirror set.

I tried connecting the drives to another, standalone SATA controller (some plain old Maxtor bundle-in one) with new SATA cables and same problem.

So, I’m not sure what to do. Here’s every issue I’ve had with the new server and its resolution:

Issue: Server locking up hard, unexpectedly. MCEs on console.
Resolution: Ensure that only matched RAM is used and that all RAM tests good during burn-in.

Issue: Slow performance / absurd latency while using 3ware disk controller.
Resolution: Identified GIANT-LOCK on driver, moved to using software mirroring.

Issue: One of the original two Western Digital disks used, which were part of a gmirror set, has started giving block errors.
Resolution: Replace disks with brand new Seagate pair.

Issue: Both of the new Seagate drives began failing with excessive Seek_Error_Rate within a few hours of each other after extensive burn in.
Resolution: Unsure.

I can’t help but wonder if one of the Seagates beginning to fail was contributing to the latency observed with the 3ware controller, but as neither was throwing SMART errors at the time, so I discount this.

My current thought is that I should order a pair of server-grade disks, burn them in as before (~50 hours of constant activity), copy the data to them, then see if things will keep working. The failed disks and the unwanted 3ware controller will go back to Newegg, and hopefully things will work right.

I don’t know what other option I have besides scrapping the whole idea of moving servers, but I really rather not do that. If anyone else has any ideas, I’d love to hear them…

Leave a Comment

New Hard Disk Is Failing

root@banstyle:~# smartctl -H /dev/ad4
smartctl version 5.38 [amd64-portbld-freebsd7.0] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   013   012   030    Pre-fail  Always   FAILING_NOW 38293929828058

root@banstyle:~#

I can’t win. Now one of the brand new hard disks in the server is getting a bunch of seek errors.

Leave a Comment

3ware 8006-2LP Sucks Under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

Results from using Bonnie++ on FreeBSD 7.0 with a 3ware controller (twe), gmirror, and just a single local disk.

As mentioned here I got my new server working with a 3ware 8006-2LP and a pair of new 500GB disks. While it was working fine, I noticed that when updating the FreeBSD ports collection that the update would occasionally pause, consuming no CPU, but with the update process having a status of sbwait. I understand this to mean that the process is waiting on a blocked socket.

It turns out that the twe(4) driver is what is known as GIANT-LOCKED, which I believe means that it uses the old SMP locking mechanism in FreeBSD:

twe0: <3ware Storage Controller. Driver version 1.50.01.002> port 0x8c00-0x8c0f mem 0xfc7ffc00-0xfc7ffc0f,0xfb800000-0xfbffffff irq 28 at device 3.0 on pci1
twe0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
twe0: [ITHREAD]
twe0: 2 ports, Firmware FE8S 1.05.00.068, BIOS BE7X 1.08.00.048

Best I can tell, the result of this is that the disk controller’s driver needs to wait for the kernel to free up other resources and tell the driver that it can go ahead and work before it does things. The result of this tends to be that the driver works well, but there is a lot of latency.

This understanding matches what I observed, which was the aforementioned lengthy pauses when doing things which required a bunch of disk IO. In order to prove this understanding out, I set up a test hard disk running a stock FreeBSD 7.0 amd64 installation from which I could run Bonnie++, a file-based disk benchmarking suite.

In my testing I used the following three scenarios:

· One 120GB IBM Deskstar PATA drive (IC35L120AVVA07) connected to the motherboard booting the OS, listed in the results as banstyle_deskstar.
· Two 500GB Western Digital SATA drives (WD5000AAKS-40TMA0) connected to the motherboard with software RAID 1 via gmirror(8), listed in the results as banstyle_gmirror.
· Two 500GB Seagate SATA drives (ST3500320AS) connected to the 3ware 8006-2LP using the twe(4) driver in hardware RAID 1, listed in the results as banstyle_twe.

The result ended up being that all three configurations are generally around the same speed for throughput, but the 3ware controller had an absurd amount of latency. If one looks at the HTML version of the Bonnie++ output here (or the PNG here or above), one can see that was giving near three SECONDS of latency for random seeks and writes using write(2). This is insane.

The only thing I can think to attribute this to is the GIANT-LOCK in twe(4). I guess this means that I’m going to have to go back to gmirror(8) for software RAID and return the card. How disappointing.

(If anyone reading this disagrees with these findings or wishes to comment on them, please don’t hesitate to do so here or by emailing me directly.)

7 Comments